<img alt=“bonnie_cap2.jpg” src=“https://blogs.nature.com/news/blog/bonnie_cap2.jpg” width=“300” height=“220” border=0 align=right hspace=10 />

NASA brought Biosatellite III back down not long after Bonnie, the pig-tailed macaque on board, refused to eat or drink despite getting 10 emergency water commands from Mission Control.

Was it a hunger strike? NASA couldn’t know. But telemetry told the mission controllers that Bonnie’s body temperature was dropping, his heart rate was low, he was taking shallow breaths and sleeping too much during his last days in orbit. Since his value as a biomedical experiment depended on his health, NASA decided to bring him back down.

Unlike the first Biosatellite mission, in which the retrorockets failed to ignite, stranding the crew of frogs and insects in orbit, Biosatellite III returned successfully to Earth.

Recovery aircraft were supposed to catch Biosatellite III as it parachuted through the atmosphere near the Hawaiian island of Kaui, but clouds and rainstorms made that impossible and NASA had to recover Bonnie from a tiny bobbing capsule in the Pacific, just like its human-crewed missions.

The recovery team rushed Bonnie to Hickam Air Force Base in Honolulu, Hawaii, where a medical team treated him and collected data from his flight. Bonny died unexpectedly at 5:04 am Houston time on 8 July 1969.

According to one report, “the science results were compromised, probably because too many bioinstruments were implanted in the monkey. Despite the failure of the mission’s scientific agenda, Biosatellite III was enormously influential in shaping the life sciences flight experiment program, pointing to the need for centralized management, more realistic goals, and substantial preflight experiment verification testing.”

See also the previous ApolloPlus40 post on Bonnie’s mission (In the Field, 29 June 2009).

Photo: RIP Bonnie. NASA

<img alt=“bonnie_cap2.jpg” src=“https://blogs.nature.com/news/blog/bonnie_cap2.jpg” width=“300” height=“220” border=0 align=right hspace=10 />

NASA brought Biosatellite III back down not long after Bonnie, the pig-tailed macaque on board, refused to eat or drink despite getting 10 emergency water commands from Mission Control.

Was it a hunger strike? NASA couldn’t know. But telemetry told the mission controllers that Bonnie’s body temperature was dropping, his heart rate was low, he was taking shallow breaths and sleeping too much during his last days in orbit. Since his value as a biomedical experiment depended on his health, NASA decided to bring him back down.

Unlike the first Biosatellite mission, in which the retrorockets failed to ignite, stranding the crew of frogs and insects in orbit, Biosatellite III returned successfully to Earth.

Recovery aircraft were supposed to catch Biosatellite III as it parachuted through the atmosphere near the Hawaiian island of Kaui, but clouds and rainstorms made that impossible and NASA had to recover Bonnie from a tiny bobbing capsule in the Pacific, just like its human-crewed missions.

The recovery team rushed Bonnie to Hickam Air Force Base in Honolulu, Hawaii, where a medical team treated him and collected data from his flight. Bonny died unexpectedly at 5:04 am Houston time on 8 July 1969.

According to one report, “the science results were compromised, probably because too many bioinstruments were implanted in the monkey. Despite the failure of the mission’s scientific agenda, Biosatellite III was enormously influential in shaping the life sciences flight experiment program, pointing to the need for centralized management, more realistic goals, and substantial preflight experiment verification testing.”

See also the previous ApolloPlus40 post on Bonnie’s mission (In the Field, 29 June 2009).

Photo: RIP Bonnie. NASA